Job Management Software for Structural Steel

That is fine. The job can stay open while the work, purchases and hours build up.

Keep their time and costs against the same job.

Keep the job updated as the work changes instead of treating the original estimate as fixed.

Keep it. WorkGuru is there to keep the job, hours, purchasing and costs together around it.

Yes, and long duration changes what you need from job costing. A job that runs twenty weeks accumulates cost continuously while the original estimate stays fixed, so the useful measure is not the final result but the trend. Labour, purchases, subcontract costs and outside processing land on the project as they occur. Seeing in week six that you are tracking fifteen per cent over on fabrication hours is actionable. Seeing it in week twenty is an autopsy.

Yes. Detailing time, workshop fabrication and site erection hours all record against the same project. For structural steel this matters because the three are usually costed separately in the estimate and then blur together in practice. Structuring the job so each has its own task keeps the comparison honest, and it tends to expose the same thing on most jobs: the detailing allowance was optimistic.

As project purchases. Outside treatment is bought work and it also occupies calendar time, so keeping it on the job preserves both. On steel work the elapsed time is often the critical path — steel at the galvaniser is steel that cannot be erected — and having the purchase attached to the project is what makes that visible when the site is asking for a date.

Yes, and on structural work this is usually where the margin is won or lost. Changes go onto the project as additional tasks, hours and purchases, with the original allowance still visible. The commercial reality of steel is that drawings develop after the contract is signed, and the fabricator absorbs a great deal of that development unless it is recorded at the time. The system does not chase the variation for you. It does mean you can show what changed rather than argue about it.

Yes. Section and plate bought for a specific job goes on purchase orders raised against the project, so the material cost sits with the steel it became. Where you hold stock sections, those issue from inventory to the job. Steel pricing moves, and having the actual purchase price on the actual job — rather than a standard rate — is what stops a whole year of quoting drifting away from reality.

Yes. Work Areas can represent bays, cranes, welding stations or the fabrication line, and work is scheduled against them. In a steel shop the binding constraint is often crane time or floor space rather than labour, and those are exactly the things a labour-only schedule cannot show you. A bay occupied by a half-finished portal frame is unavailable regardless of how many welders are free, and steel that cannot be moved because the crane is committed elsewhere stops the job just as effectively as a shortage of people. Scheduling against the physical constraint is also what makes the delivery conversation honest: you are not promising a date based on total shop hours, you are promising it based on the one resource every job has to pass through.

Your detailing package owns the model, the connections and the fabrication drawings. WorkGuru owns the commercial job: the estimate, the purchase orders, the labour, the costs, the variations and the invoicing. They are complementary rather than competing, and the handover point is usually the material list — detailing produces it, purchasing acts on it, and job costing records what it cost. Keeping that boundary clear tends to save arguments later. Detailing software is excellent at telling you what the job needs and has no view at all on whether the job made money; a job system is the reverse. The steel fabricators who struggle are usually the ones who expected one of the two to cover both, and ended up running the commercial side of a million-dollar contract out of a spreadsheet built around the material list.

Progress invoicing is supported, which matters on steel because you are rarely paid once at the end. The job stays open and accumulates cost while claims are raised against it, so the comparison between what you have claimed and what you have spent stays visible rather than being reconciled at the end. manages project retentions during progress invoicing by using dedicated Non-Stock product line items to track values as a negative liability (asset) on the balance sheet. This workflow ensures that the progress claim matches what the client expects to pay while seamlessly mapping the withheld funds to your accounting software (such as Xero) without needing manual journal entries.

Yes, and you should. Give erection its own tasks so site hours, plant hire, travel and subcontract erection costs record separately from shop hours. Most steel fabricators who lose money on supply-and-erect jobs lose it on site rather than in the shop, and a job that reports one combined number will never tell you that. Site work also behaves differently from shop work in ways that matter commercially: it is weather-dependent, it is exposed to other trades running late, and an hour of standing around waiting for access costs exactly as much as an hour of erecting. Once erection is costed separately across a run of jobs you can usually see whether your site rate has ever covered what site work actually involves, which is a different question from whether the fabrication was priced properly.

No. If your contract administration is heavy — formal RFIs, extensions of time, head-contract claims under a standard form — a dedicated construction platform will go deeper. WorkGuru runs the fabricator’s side: the job, the labour, the purchasing, the costs and the commercial result. Many steel fabricators run both, with the construction platform facing the head contractor and WorkGuru running the business.